CTV Digital Media Group Blog

In all our new players, Flash Video is the defacto standard. Period. We get it Linux and Mac people But because of our massive archive of videos encoded in Windows Media, we decided to use Silverlight as a way to display that old content in a cross-platform way that’s really simple to install…except for Linux where it’s still a little tricky to use Moonlight (btw, has anyone tried the players will Moonlight? Do they work?). It’s also great for live streams.

So the question is: Is our Silverlight implementation effective? Are people actually installing this plugin?

In our players, if you don’t have Silverlight installed already, we give you the option of installing Silverlight or trying to play it with Windows Media Player, Flip4Mac on the Mac, MPlayer, or whatever else you have installed in your browser to handle WMV embeds. We track how many people hit that screen, and if they choose to install Silverlight.

From February 1st to today, the prompt to install Silverlight was shown 38,414 times on the Comedy player. From that number, someone chose to install Silverlight 8,889 times. I assume that first number is a little high because someone who didn’t choose Silverlight, might continue to see that prompt while they click around the player. So from there, we can tell that over 23% of people without Silverlight choose to install it. That’s not bad from a fairly unknown piece of technology from Microsoft

That still doesn’t give us an idea of the actual Silverlight adoption rate of our visitors. But it does show us the percentage of people that would be willing to install something to watch an old South Park episode

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We’re finally up over 130,000 unique visitors a day to our new video players! w00t! The Comedy Network just started redirecting all their old player traffic on broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca to our new video player at watch.thecomedynetwork.ca, so that gave us a pretty big boost.

So with a 400%+ traffic spike overnight, we are investigating today how our systems are holding up. So far, so good Our CPU utilization on the one server running all the video players is at about 20% average, thanks to most of our traffic hitting our CDN. Kudos to Mike on the kickass server architecture! We’ve had some reports of slow Windows Media streaming today that might be the result of a bad node in downtown Toronto, but other than that, we’re staying up. UPDATE: That node is working again now. Shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

As we bring online some other big video properties, we’re expecting another jump in traffic that will make today seem small. Can’t wait

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